Yesterday D.W. Leitner and I had a meeting with Thomson Grass Valley. We chatted with Mike Wolschon, director of strategic marketing, about a broad range of the company’s current and future plans. The Viper Filmstream camera is coming into its own and exceeding expectations, according to Wolschon. The last year has seen important announcements related to the workflow of the high-end digital camera. DPX file import is now supported by Final Cut Pro, which Apple had shown us earlier in a testimonial by director David Fincher, who’s been working with the Viper on a recent project, Zodiac. Also, the Venom solid state recording device is now shipping—it promises to be a more manageable storage solution than what had been available previously.

About 18 months in gestation, the hard drive-based Inifinity camera is now a deliverable product. Wolschon noted that this is a significant new initiative for the company, which had never before brought out a camera near Inifinity’s price point (about $25K). Leitner pressed him on Thomson’s plans for introducing an even lower-cost camcorder—HDV perhaps—and Wolschon replied, “Ruling out the palm camcorder market would be a foolish thing to do.” Quoting statistics he heard from Larry Thorpe of Canon at the HPA Retreat, Wolschon said that there are about 150,000 HDV camcorders in the field currently.

Wolschon also spoke to the recent Canopus acquisition and what that means for the Pro AV space, which Grass Valley entered a couple years ago with the VTR-like Turbo iDDR, designed for flexible audiovisual presentations. With Canopus, Thomson gains valuable engineering assets in the realm of nonlinear editing, format conversion, and compression codecs—all key for developing a comprehensive line of products for Pro AV applications.